1. Field of Invention
Apparatuses and methods consistent with the present invention relate to an image acquiring and/or forming apparatus and a control method thereof, and more particularly, to an image acquiring/forming apparatus having an auto background removal (ABR) function and a control method thereof.
2. Description of the Related Art
An image acquiring apparatus such as a digital camera, scanner, facsimile machine, copying machine, multi-function peripheral (MFP), or the like, may employ one or more components, e.g., a charge coupled device (CCD), a contact image sensor (CIS), or the like, for reading or scanning, e.g., a document. Such an image acquiring apparatus may implement an auto background removal (ABR) or auto background suppression (ABS) function for improving the quality of the acquired image and/or (when the scanned image is to be reproduced) for saving developer (toner, ink or the like) when the document being scanned and/or copied has a background that is not entirely white, but that has a non-white color or tint, such as, e.g., some recycled paper or newspapers.
In a conventional image acquiring apparatus, in order to perform the background removal operation, a light source carriage is moved to a certain end portion of the original image or document to be read, and the detected color or gray shade at the end portion is used for the auto background removal function.
However, the foregoing method of reading a portion of the document for the purpose of the background removal requires an extraneous reading or scanning operation, and thus may increase the operational time. In addition, since the auto background removal function is performed based not on the entire background of the document, but is based only on the reading of a portion of the document, the result of the background removal may not be accurate. Moreover, it is difficult to apply the foregoing method when an automatic document feeder (ADF) mode is used, under which mode the document to be read itself moves with respect to a stationary light source carriage.
Another conventional method of background removal applies analog/digital (A/D) conversion to the image that has been read, and compensates the image in the form of the converted digital data using a lookup table (LUT) such as, e.g., a gamma 1-D table, for the background removal.
However, even in this conventional compensation method, data loss can occur during the A/D conversion operation, causing the compensation of the background to be inaccurate.